2010 Students needing remedial work won’t start at the University of Cincinnati’s main campus

It’s an action that probably has repercussions for Kentucky students and could foreshadow a trend at other competitive colleges.

The University of Cincinnati just announced that students who need remedial courses will be diverted to one of the school’s satellite campuses when they enroll next fall.

The print version of the Kentucky Enquirer’s news article, which ran Sunday under the title “Accepted at UC? Maybe Not,” provides some interesting statistics.

The current UC on-campus remedial program, known as CAT, enrolls about 600 students a year. Among the group that entered under the CAT program in 2004, only 18 percent had graduated as of the spring of 2009. That is a five-year survival rate of less than one in five students. Perhaps more will graduate from this group in the future, but the costs for the required six years of college will clearly be enormous.

Here in Kentucky, college remedial requirements are a major and continuing problem, as this graph of data from Kentucky’s Council on Postsecondary Education shows.


With UC admitting a record enrollment on its main campus this year, it only makes sense to reward the most qualified students with coveted main campus slots while allowing less competitive students a chance to improve their performance and eventually win a slot at the main campus.

It’s tough love, but absolutely essential as the costs of education continue to rise dramatically, especially at large main campus locations like UC’s. This sends the right message to high school students – work hard, fix your educational discrepancies early and don’t goof off in the senior year – unless you want to wind up in a less competitive college.